Nahwe Imbwisk

The Assemblage Point

In Journey to Ixtlan, don Genaro warns us “Intent is not merely intention”. Intent is Psychic Energy which nature is luminosity. Our energy bodies are made of Intent. Through techniques such as stalking the self (recapitulation, erasing personal history and developing the warrior’s mood), dreaming (setting up dreaming, dreaming and ascension) and handling intent (changing awareness, stopping the world, collapsing the world), the Warrior of the Spirit aims at regaining his/her luminosity. Intent resembles an infinite amount of conglomerations of luminous, self-aware and magical filaments, called the Eagle’s emanations. These emanations form a cocoon around each living being, with a point of intense brilliance, called the Assemblage Point, which aligns the filaments outside the cocoon with those inside.

Man is considered the Microcosm of the Macrocosm (Universe), so too, the assemblage point is a microcosm of the Macrocosm called Man. Don Juan describes to Castaneda how our state can be compared to being a huge man in the room (luminous cocoon) and at the same time a tiny person at the window (assemblage point), observing the subject in the room. It is hard to comprehend this view without having had personal experiences with the movements and shifts of the assemblage point through dreaming. Ultimately, Castaneda says that everything we perceive, feel and how we act is determined by the position of the assemblage point.

The Three Attentions

The Toltec divide perception and knowledge into three parts: 1. The Known 2. The Unknown and 3. The Unknowable. Every human can be trained to perceive all three.

We deal with the known using the first attention, or the awareness of the everyday world. However, at certain times we are filled with an inspiration, our awareness changes and we are able to realize things we knew nothing about. That is called the second attention. The second attention when mastered offers enormous power, such as the control over people and even the weather, but those who do not transcend this stage can never hope to find Freedom.

There are two paths between which each Toltec can choose: 1. The Path of High Adventures and 2. The Path of Freedom. The former aims at perfecting the powers of the second attention while the latter aims at the ultimate power - The Power to Create and Destroy

If we give up the temptation of using our power to manipulate things but instead use our energy for the purpose of Freedom, we eventually develop the Third Attention, or the state of omniscience.

The True Power of Man

Theun Mares' book the Mysts of Dragon Lore deals with the concept of Toltec Staking. In the Toltec tradition Stalking has very little of the negative connotation of creeping up on people, although interacting with people is an essential part of the strategy.

Stalking is 1. The act of turning the energy body from an eggshape into a stalkshape and 2. the ability to empathize. By changing their energy body to become elongated sticklike beings, the ancient sorcerers were able to prolong their lives infinitely and perceive so much more then the avarage human could even dream of. However, that came with a price - the inability to return to their natural state. To avoid that mistake, the New Seers introduced the rule that stalking be practiced only for the benefit of both parties, the stalker and the stalked.

Stalking is the foundation upon which manipulation of perception is based. We can become anything for which we have the perceptual parametars, that is stalking. The greatest source of power is feeling like someone else does.